Chapter 9
In This Chapter
Editing and moving text
Listening to your text
Understanding Natural Language Commands in Word
Formatting and editing with Natural Language
Inserting tables with Natural Language
Working in OpenOffice.org Writer
If you have used Dragon Professional Individual for even a short amount of time, you know that there are many different ways of accomplishing the same thing. You can use some applications, such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, and Corel WordPerfect, with Natural Language Commands.
In this chapter, I look at all the ways you can work in Word or WordPerfect for an easy, uncomplicated experience. I discuss how Natural Language Commands make it even more intuitive. At the time of this writing, Word 2010 (English), Word 2013, Word 2016, and WordPerfect X6 and X7 are supported.
If you work with online applications, look at using OpenOffice.org Writer as your word-processing program.
If you are new to using Dragon Professional Individual with Word, you want to know the quickest ways to find the right thing to say. Here are some things to do when you’re stumped:
To get started with Word, you don’t need any special Natural Language Commands. You’re already familiar with them. Some of the commands you’ll most likely use are
A familiar set of features in Word are “Playback” and “Read That.” Playback lets you play back a recording of your voice to help you proofread. Read That is the Dragon Professional Individual text-to-speech feature. Chapter 7 provides the details of both Playback and Read That.
You can play back your text by menu command and voice command. First, select the text you want to hear. The menu command for playback is Audio ⇒ Playback.
You can have Dragon Professional Individual read your selected text aloud by using the “Read That” command.
The worst thing about dealing with computers is that you have to learn their language. Sure, Dragon Professional Individual takes dictation, but when you want to tell it what to do with that dictation, you’re back in the same old situation, right? If you don’t like a 10-point font, you have to say something geeky like, “Format That Size 12.”
If an actual human was setting type for you, you wouldn’t say anything remotely like “Format That Size 12,” would you? You’d say, “Make it a little bigger,” and the person would know what to do.
That’s what a Natural Language Command is. It’s a command that sounds like something you would naturally say, in your own language, rather than something you would say only because you’re talking to a computer. In this section, I help you dictate Word documents in a way that might seem fairly natural to you.
The engineers who built Natural Language Commands for Word believe in freedom of speech. They tried to anticipate any way in which you might want to command Word. I think this task is Herculean, given that people may say anything from, “Bold That Sucker” to “Slice This Turkey into Two Columns.” (You’re probably more restrained.)
Nonetheless, Nuance engineers do succeed in giving you a lot of flexibility with Natural Language Commands.
So, I would be crazy to try to document all the thousands of ways you can give commands, and you wouldn’t be any better off. Instead, I mainly tell you what you can talk about, and tell you the best verbal commands to use.
If Dragon Professional Individual doesn’t perform your command, either Dragon Professional Individual doesn’t recognize it as a command or the command can’t be accomplished because the context where you’re trying to use it is incorrect. (See Chapter 20 to see what to do if this happens.) The following sections tell you how to perform many Word commands by using Natural Language Commands.
The simplest way to think about dictating with Natural Language Commands is that you can work with your favorite documents in their natural settings. Word and WordPerfect have similar commands, so for the purposes of my examples, I refer to Word.
Don’t panic if “Undo That” doesn’t seem to completely restore an error. Speak the command again. You may have to repeat the command several times to restore things as they were.
Many Dragon Professional Individual commands are actually multiple commands as far as your word processor is concerned. “Undo That” undoes only one Word or WordPerfect command at a time.
Natural Language Commands for editing in Word are just what you would expect. Just say something and see if it works.
Here are some familiar ones:
One of the best editing features of Natural Language Commands has nothing to do with the Edit menu. It’s the “Move That” command. With “Move That,” you can select text and then say, “Move That Down Two Paragraphs,” for instance.
You can replace the word “That” with a reference to any number of words, lines, paragraphs, sections, or pages. For instance, you can say, “Move Next Three Paragraphs to Bottom of Document” or “Move Previous Three Lines Up One Paragraph.”
Natural Language Commands can be used for anything on the Insert menu. You can use the Natural Language “Insert <something>” command for page and section breaks, by just saying, “Insert Page Break.” You can also use the command for other whitespace features like lines, tables, and columns. (Whitespace refers to stuff that doesn’t actually put ink on paper.)
Say the word “Insert,” and then immediately say one of the terms in the following list of whitespace <somethings>:
To insert just one of any in this list, use the singular form, as in “Insert Line.” To insert several, use the plural form and tell Dragon Professional Individual how many you want. For instance, say, “Insert Ten Lines.”
The verb “Insert” can also be used for formatting borders, numbers, and bullets. See the later section “Formatting paragraphs,” in this chapter.
Natural Language Commands for Word offer commands for printing. You can print any number of pages, the current page, or selected text, and you can use Print Preview.
Say, “Print,” then one of the following terms (substituting your chosen page numbers for <page number>):
So, for instance, say, “Print Preview On” or “Print Page.” You can say, “Print This Page” or “Print Pages <number> to <number>,” too, if you prefer.
Natural Language Commands have commands for margins, which are on the File (Office Button) menu. State your marginal commands by saying,
“Set Left, Right, Top, Bottom, Margin To <distance> <units>”
For example, you can say, “Set Top Margin To One Point Two Inches.” The <distance> in this example is 1.2 and the <units> are inches. Allowable units are inches, centimeters, and points.
Formatting is where Natural Language Commands for Word really get interesting, mainly because there is so much more to talk about. You can make things larger or smaller or indent them more or less.
In Word, you can format characters (choose basic fonts and styles, like bold) using the same commands you use in any other Full Text Control application. See Chapter 6 for instructions.
Natural Language Commands give you additional options for Word, however. I give only a few examples here, using my favorite “Format That” command, and point out where Natural Language Commands add flexibility:
You can use an imperative verb form of command for certain styles. (Remember imperative verbs from English class? No, me neither, but that’s what they are!) The imperatives for fonts are a short list, as follows:
As with most commands in Natural Language Commands, you can say them in different ways. Here are a few of the variations Natural Language Commands allow for font commands:
For formatting paragraphs in Word, I prefer (you guessed it) the “Format That <some formatting>” command. You can use “Format That” no matter whether you’re formatting paragraphs, fonts, or anything else, and this command is easiest for my poor brain to remember.
When you format paragraphs, you can use two other types of commands. Table 9-1 gives the gory details. The top three rows give the conventional commands that work anywhere (left-, right-, and center-align). The remaining rows list commands that Natural Language Commands give you.
Table 9-1 Three Ways to Format Paragraphs in Word
Say, “Format That” and Then |
Or Just Say |
Notes |
“Left Aligned” |
“Left Align That” |
|
“Right Aligned” |
“Right Align That” |
|
“Center Aligned” or “Centered” |
“Center That” |
|
“Justified” |
“Justify That” |
Means no ragged right edge. |
(nothing) |
“Indent That” (Also “Outdent That”) |
Means increase indentation to the next default or user-added tab stop. (Outdenting decreases indentation.) |
(nothing) |
“Indent That by <distance>“ |
For indenting a specific amount (for example, 1.5 inches). Substitute your indentation distance for <distance>. |
“Bulleted” or “Bullet Style” |
“Bullet That” |
Say, “Unbullet That” or “Make that not bullet style” to turn off bullets. |
(nothing) |
“Double Space That” |
Dragon Professional Individual gives you no Natural Language command for setting tabs. For most purposes, though, you can use indentation or table commands instead.
For most work, I suggest my favorite command, “Format That <whatever>.”
As with font formatting, Natural Language Commands let you say paragraph-formatting commands in different ways. Here are some of the variations Natural Language Commands allow you:
Want a top-level heading? Say, “Change Style to Heading 1.” Want to redefine what Heading 1 is? Format a paragraph (by voice or by hand).
If you aren’t familiar with styles, here’s the story in brief: Styles are combinations of font and paragraph formatting that go by a certain name, such as Heading 1. Word comes with certain predetermined styles. You, however, can change what font and paragraph formatting goes with any of the named styles.
To apply a style, first click in a paragraph or select some text. Then say, “Set That Selection To,” followed immediately by any of the following phrases:
Natural Language Commands don’t perform all the Word styles, just the ones I list.
Some of the style commands, like the ones for numbered and bulleted styles, sound very much like the paragraph formatting commands, but they really refer to named styles. The number “2” or “3” at the end of certain commands refers to how much the line is indented. A “3” is more indented than a “2.”
As with paragraph and font commands, Natural Language Commands let you say it your way. Here are three ways you can say things:
Natural Language Commands bring to Word all the editing and formatting features of the Dragon Professional Individual DragonPad (described in Chapters 5 and 6). See those chapters for the picky details. Here’s an overview of those features and a couple of examples of the verbal commands each uses:
How easy can this be? Following are the commands for the two Microsoft Word tools for spelling and grammar:
On the other hand, if you truly are dictating everything in your document using Dragon Professional Individual, you should never need to run the spelling checker! Dragon Professional Individual never makes a spelling error (unless you added a misspelled word to your Dragon Professional Individual vocabulary).
Keep in mind that when you check spelling, the Word spell checker may not recognize words that are in your Dragon Professional Individual vocabulary. The two programs maintain their own lists of acceptable words.
You can use Natural Language Commands to create Word tables with up to 20 rows or columns. Use the commands “Insert,” “Add,” or “Create,” as you prefer. I prefer “Insert” because it’s the same command I use for other whitespace insertions like spaces, paragraphs, and page breaks. Here are the different forms of commands you can use (using “Insert” as my example):
“Insert <n> By <m> Table”
Substitute numbers between 1 and 20 for <n> and <m>. In any of these commands, you can say the columns first and then the rows, or vice versa.
You can leave out either the rows or the columns in any of these commands and then add them later.
After you have a table, you can verbally move your cursor around in the table, referring to rows, columns, or cells. Commands use either “Move” or “Go” and take forms like these examples:
You can move Left, Right, Up, Down, Back, Backward, Ahead, or Forward.
You can add rows or columns using exactly the same sort of command you use to create a table: “Insert,” “Add,” or “Create.” Place the insertion point where you want to add stuff, and speak the command.
As usual, I prefer “Insert.” You can insert a number of rows or columns or insert a new row or column. Here are a few examples, using my favorite command, “Insert”:
You can select, delete, cut, or copy rows, columns, or cells just as you would words in regular text. For instance, you can use “Select Row” to select the row your cursor is in. To paste a row, column, or cell you have copied, use “Paste That.” Don’t refer to a row, column, or cell in the command.
Inserting, deleting, and pasting by voice works just as it does when you insert, delete, or paste by hand. That is, rows are inserted above the current row; columns are inserted to the left of the current column.
Natural Language Commands don’t give you any special commands for document windows in Word. If you want to do anything in the Word Window menu — such as use Arrange All to display all open Word documents on the screen — you have to do it manually or with the “Click View” command. You can, however, make use of the key combination Ctrl+F6 to switch document windows (say, “Press Control F6”). Ctrl+F4 closes a document window (say, “Press Control F4”).
This isn’t to say you can’t switch between the Word window and other program windows. As in any application, you can say, “Switch To <program name>” (if that program is running) or “Switch To Previous/Next Window.”
Want an online suite of office products that you don’t have to license? If so, check out OpenOffice.org. It is an open source program that includes a word processor called Writer and several other applications that resemble the Microsoft Office suite.
People use it so they always have access to the most up-to-date version of the application. (Also, it’s free.) In Dragon Professional Individual, Nuance has commands that can be used directly with OpenOffice.org Writer 3.x and 4.x
The following are some tips you should know if you want to use Writer with Dragon Professional Individual:
You can use the general navigation commands to edit when you dictate. For example: “Go To,” “Select,” “Line Up,” “Line Down,” “Page Up,” or “Page Down.”
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